National Holiday Break

Dear Parents and Friends,

It’s hard to believe that we have reached the end of the first academic term – so much has happened.

As a school we have made significant progress towards meeting our goals for 2018-19. One of these aims was to improve the communications between the school and the community. To achieve this, we have already started to review our school web-site and our aim is to translate the information here into Chinese and Korean – particularly the information about our PYP, MYP and Diploma curricula. We have also started to have our important parental documents translated into Korean, and some of this material has already been shared with our Korean parents in Secondary School.

We have had the Hanova Parent Teacher Association (HPTA) Constitution translated into Korean as well as Chinese. We hope to be able to send out this document to all Hanova parents before the holiday.

After the holiday, we hope to call our first HPTA meeting of the academic year, where I will outline the constitution and the election procedures with you.

Looking ahead, please be reminded that, on Friday October 26, is our United Nations International Day. As soon as the programme is decided upon, we will inform you.

In the meantime, on behalf of the school, I’d like to wish everyone a well-deserved rest over the holiday. Travel safely.

News from Secondary School. Next week is National Holiday and I would like to wish all members of the school community a happy and restful week. Secondary School students doing the Diploma Programme will have essential tasks they need to be working on, so I would ask families to support those students over the break in completing those tasks.

The first Friday after the break on October 12, reports will be issued to MYP students. These are progress reports to allow parents to have knowledge of how their child has started the new school year. The reports will consist of grades only to give you guidance of progress.

These reports will be followed by a parent/teacher/student conference on the afternoon of Wednesday 17 October. It is important that all parents attend this conference with their child. A strong partnership between home and school is essential for students to maximise their achievement. Further details will be sent out after the break.

It has been great to see the recently introduced academies in football and basketball doing well. There are a number of enthusiastic students who are meeting every week and we look forward to introducing other games very soon.

With the weather becoming cooler, I would like to remind parents that the school uniform includes both a rain jacket and a warm jacket. Could parents please ensure that their child is wearing the correct warm clothing when they return to school after the break.

Year 11 students in MYP Design class had a lovely surprise this week. In celebration of their successful completion of their summative assessments, they treated themselves to a full cooked breakfast – sausages, bacon and cheese on toast – under the watchful eye of their teacher.

Australian Mathematics Competition Test Centre.

We are to tell you that we are now a Test Centre of the Australian Mathematics Competition.

We have received the awarding certificate last week, and it is hung in the lobby now.

We will inform our students of the registration time and give support to students who are interested in mathematics competition to participate in the AMC as well as the CAT annually. Each competition participation fee including past paper resource is 200 Yuan. Candidates are divided into A/B/C/D/E levels according to their year groups.

Students whose ranks are in top X% nationally may get awards. See details in the Chinese official sites:

Math Online Resources. The school has agreed to use IXL as an online math resource in Years 2-6. We believe this will provide consistency across the PYP in skill levels, in-home activities, and diagnostic data for our math curriculum. For the younger students in Nursery-Year 1 we have decided to use Starfall as we feel this will be a more age-appropriate resource. This resource will be used only in school with the younger students. For our youngest students, we won’t be assigning electronic math homework. Since the trial subscriptions have ended, the homeroom teachers will need some time to set up the new subscriptions. Please look for new login information from your child’s homeroom teacher after the National Holiday week.

‘Mother Tongue’ Languages. We will begin our ‘Mother Tongue’ programme for Years 3-6 after the National Holiday week. We are looking for some parent volunteers to assist with our most represented languages. If you are a native English, or Korean speaker and would like to volunteer to work alongside a Hanova teacher to support students in connecting ‘Mother Tongue’ with our school curriculum, please email our PYP Coordinator at trish.scott@his-xian.com.

After we have the volunteers in place, we will meet explaining the vision and purpose of this programme. We need at least 4 Korean speakers support the ‘Mother Tongue’ needs of our current students in the Upper Primary. We are grateful to have a volunteer already in place for our native German speakers. These sessions will be held each Tuesday during Period 7 (3:10 – 4:00).

Thanks again for your continuing support.

Yours,

Robert C. Muntzer

Upcoming Events

Please take note of these dates, while we will soon inform about any additional events and activities that will take place in the following weeks:

Xi’an Hanova International School is an IB Continuum School, fully authorized to offer the internationally renowned IB Primary Years Programme since 2017 (Early Years – Y6), IB Middle Years Programme since 2016 (Years 7-11) and IB Diploma Programme since 2014 (Y12 – Y13) – with 20 different Diploma subjects available to students.